Hello. I use sumifs and countifs on summary pages often, and I find that I always need to create a column with concatenated in my main sheet. I'm wondering if there's a way to avoid this.

For example: on my summary page, I have years as column headers and event titles as rows. I want to create summary data showing the sum of people in each event for each year. What I would do is create a "Event name - Year" concatenated column on my data page, and then use a countif like this:

=countif([Event name - year column],concatenate(B$1,$A2))

Any ideas? When my spreadsheets get large, I end up with so many concatenated columns.

Thanks so much.
Amanda